Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

We just hosted Indian publishing legend Mahendra Meghani , who dropped in last week when many of our team were traveling. The following account comes from Pavi Mehta, Bookshare's Volunteer Coordinator, and I wanted to post it! It was a quietly special visit. Meghani came with his two hosts and daughter, and at 86 is still keenly interested in learning how technology can help bring books to the disadvantaged. With Carrie’s help he chopped his latest book (a compilation of Gandhi’s writings) up for the Bookshare collection. His publishing house mainly deals with literature in Gujarati but they do have a handful of books in English that they are more than happy to send to us. Viji [Dilip, Bookshare international manager] has sent over the appropriate paperwork and we’ll follow up on that. This is a guy who as his daughter put it, piled books onto a little vegetable cart and trundled it into the market place so that the common man in small town India would be exposed to the literat...

As the chair of the Social Enterprise Alliance, I have the opportunity to address the annual Summit. I had a blast in New Orleans revving up the crowd about this exciting time for the Social Enterprise Alliance and the movement. Here's the text of my speech: [long post alert] Social Enterprise: Not Business as Usual! Jim Fruchterman Chairman’s Address to the Social Enterprise Alliance 2009 Annual Summit The world’s a mess. I thought that would be news to you. We’ve got a lot of problems. We have a global economic meltdown. We have instability and violence all over the world. And we have this thing called the global climate crisis. It’s kind of daunting. The challenges of today’s world demand innovation because we can’t afford — business as usual. I want to talk to you today about this moment in time, this great opportunity for us. We’re joining together to talk about the new face of business. An approach that puts social issues foremost; a strategy that delivers better resul...

The Bookshare team has been attending the summer conventions of the two major blind consumer groups, the NFB and ACB. We had great user parties, listened to our users and talked to other key players in the accessibility field. We also announced a couple of assistive technology partnerships. The first release was about support for mobile phone use with software developer Code Factory of Spain . It still takes downloading the book to a PC and transferring it to the cell phone, but I'm looking forward to getting rid of that extra step! The second announcement was by Plextor of Japan, about their new ebook player that will play Bookshare books . The device also allows users to record their own audio books. The last item I wanted to highlight was a White House blog post with President Obama hosting a delegation of people who are both deaf and blind . I was just delighted to see this quote from the post: This visit was not and should not be viewed as a sympathetic thing for the Pre...

It was exciting to note the publication of my big article on Benetech in MIT Press' Innovations journal. I just received the PDF and was able to post it on Benetech's site. As many of you know, I'm committed to doing a book (and am holed up at Caltech's Athenaeum this week working on it). This article was my first big step in writing up some of Benetech's history and why we do what we do, and the process of working with the editors gave me a taste of what I'm in for with a book!

Enjoyed my day in Berkeley yesterday at the Craigslist Foundation Bootcamp 2009. They had more than 1000 folks show up to talk about service, nonprofits and social action. I thought Arianna Huffington did a good job as the opening keynoter hitting on the service theme. Announcing All For Good was a big piece of the event, of course. Randi Zuckerberg of Facebook had the tough gig of presenting a lunch keynote outside under a tent in lower Sproul Plaza (mucho noise and people talking). She was much more on Facebook marketing message, but of course that's her role at FB. Lots of enthusiastic FB users in the audience helped make her points. I took a lot of pictures, but not that many turned out. Posted the best 30 or so on Flickr : got some great ones of Steve Wright of the Salesforce Foundation. I enjoyed some of the breakout sessions, although the number of concurrent sessions (often 8 at one time) made it hard to pick. Enjoyed Deb Jospin and Shirley Sagawa discussing the Cha...

We had a nice piece on Bookshare in the latest AARP Bulletin, entitled: Making Books Accessible for Those With Disabilities. We've been getting lots of questions about the article, including volunteer offers (yay!) and interest in getting Bookshare for older parents. We have shared with people that it's ok for children of disabled parents to download books for their parents, just as it's ok for parents to download books for children with disabilities. Our team has been explaining how to assist a disabled senior who doesn't have a PC, by empowering a PC-using child to download the book and load it onto a device like a Victor Stream (an ebook player that has a voice synthesizer that speaks our books). These kinds of devices are much more like the tape recorders and CD players with which non-PC users are familiar. Of course, we explain that access to Bookshare is only for the purpose of helping a person with a print disability. It's always exciting to be covered in...

Last Friday I spent almost two and a half hours in a wide-ranging conversation with Maria Pallante and Michele Woods of the Copyright Office (Michele's name updated, plus a summer law clerk attended) . I came away with a much better understanding of the issues they are exploring and certainly did my part to articulate why I support the positions we have. [Long post alert!] I would characterize the atmosphere as one of informed and intelligent skepticism on the part of the Copyright Office, with many questions exploring different positions. We discussed Chafee, especially in the context of the Amazon text-to-speech brouhaha, and the proposed international treaty that was tabled at the WIPO SCCR meeting in Geneva last month. The Chafee Amendment The U.S. copyright exemption for serving the print disabled is commonly called the Chafee Amendment: Section 121 of copyright law. It’s what makes our Bookshare service legally possible. The fact-finding public hearing and request for com...